PS:Don’t get me wrong,I played both games for a lot and love both but WoW started getting shitty for me with all the new expansions.

Here you have the official Forbes post.

Of course there will be a lot of controversy about this but the numbers are impressive.

Hi everyone,

I have news on our Twitch and Eve reworks, or what you’ve come to recognize as the infamous “stealth rework.”

I know this has been a major pain for Twitch and especially Eve players for a long time – far too long. It’s also been tough to communicate with you guys on this particular subject due to some failed experiments and iterations that impacted its timeline. That’s been a bad experience for all of you, and we’re sorry for the long radio silence. We’ve learned a lot.

Why Twitch and Eve needed change

First, I want to provide context – this might be a repeat for some of you, but it’s really important to understand why we believe these changes are necessary:

Long-term stealth is a contentious mechanic. It’s really fun for the person using it to gank, but it absolutely blows for the player on the receiving end. Long-term stealth encourages hugging your tower all day long, with stealth detection such as Oracles or Vision Wards being the only viable counter-play option, which is a binary and boring mechanic. Not fun.

It’s also proven near-impossible to balance these mechanics. Long-term stealth isn’t effective against high level players, because they know how to counter it, so it’s never something we’d see in pro-level play. That runs contrary to our goals of increasing the diversity of champion picks. Today, we consistently see over 70% of champions picked in tournaments, but almost never these champions. This is better than it’s ever been in this genre but we’d like to see even more.

But stealth is cool!

All that said, there are some characteristics of long-term stealth we want to preserve. It’s satisfying for scouting and concealing map movement. It allows for some powerful counter-jungling opportunities. It can set the stage for some clutch late game moments.

So in order to deliver the fun of stealth while removing the toxic elements, we explored A LOT of ideas. And we explored them in great depth. You might remember some of the ideas we floated on the forums – ‘robot chicken’ scouting drone, footprints, and others. Those were only a few of the ideas we designed, prototyped, and ultimately decided weren’t good enough to get the job done.

Where we ended up

So, where did we end up? Twitch and Eve are both getting complete ability remakes. Eve is getting new abilities that include a reworked version of long-term stealth, with some similar mechanics to what we attempted a while ago. Twitch is getting shorter-term, tactical stealth and significant kit changes to improve his performance as both an assassin and AD carry.

Let’s talk about Eve in more detail first – because, let’s face it, she’s the most negatively impacted by her current state. For that, I’ll turn it over to Statikk, who’s working on finalizing Eve’s design.

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Evelynn ability remake overview

Like Morello said, Evelynn is keeping long-term stealth, making her the only champion currently in the game with such a mechanic. Evelynn’s entire concept – from design to theme to aesthetic – is built around the idea of stealth, and so it was important for us to find a way for persistent stealth to live in League of Legends via Eve.

The system we’ve chosen to implement for her new stealth mechanic is similar to what some of you might remember Xypherous talking about a while ago.

Eve’s new stealth

Eve’s passive is now Shadow Walk. From Level 1, Evelynn is stealthed, meaning she can only be seen by enemy champions within a relatively short range of her, or when she passes through true sight (e.g., Vision Wards). She becomes unstealthed whenever she enters combat and reenters stealth after a brief cooldown once out of combat.

That means Evelynn is still hard to pinpoint in terms of map position, and she retains the feel of roaming around and scouting out areas for her team. Her new ring of visibility also introduces some interesting gameplay opportunities for great Evelynn players. Through careful attention, Eve can strategically juke around enemies, carefully set up surprise engagements, and unlock all sorts of new options that will reward player skill.

However, opponents now have a small window of opportunity to react, since she becomes visible before she’s directly on top of them (rather, she’ll be closing in on them at the time of detection).

Eve’s new kit

Since Eve’s now slightly more detectable at close range, we’ve been able to give her a much more robust kit:

• We’ve enhanced Eve’s mobility: instead of just having a movement speed steroid on a long-cooldown ult, one of Eve’s new base abilities passively grants her stacking movement speed on spell hits, as well as an active sprint on a short cooldown. These effects can stack.
• Hate Spike is getting a significantly longer range and the ability to hit more targets.
• Eve’s getting a new ultimate — a ranged AoE that damages and slows enemies while granting her some increased durability based on how successful she is at landing it.

Results

All in all, these changes make Evelynn a much more viable, flexible pick. She’s still a strong duelist and ganker thanks to her stealthy nature, enhanced mobility and high damage output. These new changes also give her some much-needed team fight presence.

We’ll be putting Eve up on the PBE for final testing and QA in the next content patch – look forward to her full kit details and feel free to give her some hands-on testing at that time.

Next up: Classick with the Twitch details.

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Twitch ability remake overview

For a while now, we’ve felt like Twitch hasn’t lived up to our original design vision. Our goal when revisiting his kit was to restore some of his intended gameplay style and feel without drifting away from what existing Twitch players have come to love.

We’ve always wanted Twitch’s poison gameplay to be rewarding and deadly in the right hands. Good Twitch players should be able to deliberately stack poisons and put out massive damage with Expunge. Currently, Expunge doesn’t scale well and Spray and Pray’s poison-stacking isn’t valued over its direct damage, making Twitch’s poison gameplay feel lackluster at most stages of the game.

Twitch’s new stealth

We wanted to buff Twitch’s poison gameplay across the board, but in order to accomplish this we needed to address how Twitch used stealth. Because of the inherent advantages that long-term stealth brings, we haven’t been able to adequately buff the rest of Twitch’s abilities. This was impacting his competitive viability. The more we looked at Twitch’s kit and where we wanted him to end up, the more we realized that making Ambush a short-term, tactical tool would enable us to realize his envisioned potential.

Twitch’s new kit

Because Ambush’s stealth now has a short duration, we have some breathing room to buff Twitch in other departments:

• Expunge now scales well into late-game, which includes getting additional damage from your bonus Attack Damage. It also now scales off of both AP andAD.
• Spray and Pray is no longer about melting entire teams via AoE – it’s now more important as a tool for strategically stacking poisons.
• We’ve remade Debilitating Poison into a new ability called Venom Cask, which now further contributes to his venom-stacking gameplay
• His base stats are getting buffed.
• Twitch is also getting some quality of life improvements, which include making his attack animation snappier.

Results

Twitch is going to be in a much better spot at all levels of competition with his new abilities and focus. His core gameplay is getting some much-needed love, and his new Ambush feels great.

Stay tuned for full details on Twitch’s kit – he’s going up on the PBE for final testing and QA in the next content patch, and we’ll have some news on the front page detailing his full kit at that time.

“While I maintain that Jayce’s whole weapon-transforming thing is really fun, it’s really not about some big mega-release milestone. It’s a nice round number, sure, but I think it’d be kind of ****ty of us if we were holding something back for this that we’d had been capable of doing previously.

I kind of see it as every champion needs to be a milestone of some kind – just trying to do something we hadn’t done before in regards to gameplay, art, lore, or any mixture of them. I’ll talk more about a couple of the big issues (monsters, why 3 masculine-style males so close) in a future post, but for this I wanna focus on the specific “champ 100 thing.” I feel if there was something more special we could have done here, why aren’t we doing that for every champion?

I actually did a quick interview for a cool little video that takes a look back at our first 100 champions…it shows some of the process we use and a bit of revealing the man behind the curtain. I think that goes live next week.

So, I probably shouldn’t do this, but what the Hell. I’m really stoked about champion 101 too because I got to work much much more directly on it than I usually do and it’s an archetype I think we’ve needed. I’ll….plant a little teaser for you.”

Here you have some information about him and his abilities. (source:PC Gamer)

Jayce is described as “a class act and charmer,” a “modern gentleman,” and a “scientific genius” who is “a brazen, well-equipped man for all seasons.” He also carries a giant two-handed hammer that turns into a taser crossbow. Pretty darn solid lineup for the centurion champion.

Mechanics-wise, Jayce functions similar to Nidalee, using his ultimate ability to switch between two stances that swap out the rest of his abilities. He’s primarily an AD Fighter with some CC and the ability to switch between melee and ranged weapons.

Hammer Abilities.

Cannon Abilities.

 

 

This champion looks really interesting and fun.Now at this moment he looks quite Overpowered to me mostly in a high skilled player’s hands but we will see about that soon enough.

Recently it was announced that Namco Bandai would assist in developing the new Smash Bros. game alongside Project Nora, and today they have published a teaser site with a three day countdown.

The countdown has a couple of unusual photographs surrounding it and we reckon that day by day more pictures will be revealed, allowing the forums to go wild with assumptions as to what characters or what details they encompass. ‘All Star Battle‘ appears to be some sort of working title but of course in three days’ time we hope that the assumptions can end and relevant detail arrives.

The latest Smash Bros. project has only recently begun so we wouldn’t expect the countdown to reveal massive details or something truly astonishing but in all honesty it’s just nice to hear the Smash Bros. name once again. If you forget to check out the site in three days time we can be sure to keep you all updated.

Sony announced this morning that it will purchase game streaming serviceGaikai for $380 million in a “definitive agreement” that will see cloud gaming head to Sony Computer Entertainment’s various properties. The announcement shies away from saying anything too specific, but notes that “SCE will establish a new cloud service” based on today’s acquisition. The implication of course is that Gaikai will offer cloud-streaming gaming via the PlayStation 3 and Vita, not to mention any unannounced future systems and other Sony properties (Bravia televisions, for instance).

“SCE Will deliver a world-class cloud-streaming service that allows users to instantly enjoy a broad array of content ranging from immersive core games with rich graphics to casual content anytime, anywhere on a variety of internet-connected devices,” SCE prez and CEO Andrew House said of the news, hinting at where we’ll see Gaikai’s tech implemented.

It’s unclear whether the streaming tech is intended for Sony’s PlayStation 3 or for future consoles unknown (or both). It’s also unclear if Gaikai CEO David Perry will remain with his company in any capacity, or if he’ll move to Sony, or if he’s out altogether. And how does this affect Gaikai’s existing partnerships withvarious television manufacturers (especially considering Sony’s also in the television market)? We’re not sure just yet.

Gaikai was recently rumored to be seeking a buyer, to the lofty tune of $500 million. Today’s news sees them coming up $120 million short of that number.